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‘LWCF is very important for rural communities who want to pursue outdoor recreation as a vehicle for rural economic development,’ said Megan Lawson, an economist with Headwaters Economics, an independent, nonprofit research group. ‘LWCF has touched all 50 states, touched thousands of local communities, and it’s an important resource especially in rural places.’

Mark Haggerty with the research group Headwaters Economics says one-industry towns are inherently vulnerable. ‘The real effort that needs to take place is trying to diversify and reach out and branch out into new sectors, into new ideas that will sustain the community going forward.’

The outdoor recreation economy has been a rare bright spot in many rural communities, particularly those places near public lands. Rural counties with recreation-based economies have slightly higher incomes and are seeing more population growth since 2010, according to Headwaters Economics’ 2019 report, Recreation Counties Attracting New Residents and Higher Incomes. 

The country’s largest dune field has been a national monument since 1933, but now it’s our 62nd national park. The new designation will also have positive impacts on the surrounding community: a 2018 study found that turning monuments to national parks could increase visitation by 21 percent (about 100,000 more visitors) in the first five years and result in a $7.5 million increase in the local economy, mainly due to increased visibility. 

Rural recreation counties are growing faster than counties that don’t have a lot of hiking, hunting and fishing opportunities, according to the nonprofit Headwaters Economics.

In total, 16 states now have some kind of recreation office or task force. Each functions slightly differently…That state-specific development approach is becoming increasingly important in rural areas struggling to retain residents. The research group Headwaters Economics found that rural areas with recreation options have both more people moving in and a faster earnings growth.

From 1990 to 2016, over 1.3 million acres of undeveloped land in Montana was converted into housing, according to a 2018 report by Headwaters Economics. The demographic landscape is changing as well: Several western Montana counties are attracting younger people and new residents from across the country. All this population growth is making water management more complicated. 

A recent analysis by the group Headwaters Economics showed that visitation to U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management land has risen by about 15% over the past decade, while budgets to support recreation in those agencies has fallen by a similar amount, as NPR has reported.

Ray Rasker, of Headwaters Economics in Bozeman, sees the issue a bit differently.

“Montana has done a really good job at investing in recreation infrastructure,” he said.

He pointed to Montana’s fishing access sites as one example. The state has about 332 sites that allow anglers and boaters a place to launch, fish or just play in the water. Each one, on average, costs the state about $150,000. Totaled up, that’s a huge investment, almost $50 million. Yet revenues derived just from anglers in the state — not counting all of the boaters who use the access sites — is $900 million a year, he said.

“That’s a good return on investment.”

Colstrip is just one town in a region that relies on coal for economic stability. A 2018 study from Headwaters Economics found that many of these places in the West lack adequate plans to address the economic and human impacts of coal industry decline.

Mark Haggerty, an economist for Headwaters Economics, authored the study. He has been writing about the impacts of natural resource extraction for a decade. He said there are few actions that towns and counties can take to prepare for industry decline without direction or policy change at the state level.

The Montana Governor’s Office is searching for new ways to tap into the state’s outdoor economy — an economic engine already fueled by more than $7 billion spent in the state each year. The Office of Outdoor Recreation hosted what it billed as its first innovation lab in Whitefish, Thursday.

According to a 2018 report from Headwaters Economics, state parks receive more than 2.5 million visitors a year.” 

Two trends are converging in large wildland states like Montana — more frequent and severe wildfires and rapid home development in wildfire prone areas. A conference this week examined how homes burn and how to protect them.

Kelly Pohl is with Headwaters Economics, a non-profit research organization based in Bozeman. The group hosted the Building for Wildfire Summit in Big Sky this week along with the Big Sky Fire Department.

Pohl says one in three homes in the U.S. are in the wildland-urban interface. That’s where homes meet or intermingle with flammable vegetation — like a house built on the edge of a forest. In Montana, Pohl says more than half of the homes built here are in those kind of fire prone areas. The big sky state is ranked number one in the nation for the highest percentage of homes in areas with extreme risk to wildfires.

Centennial State still has no permanent mineral trust fund…

Mark Haggerty, of Headwaters Economics, a Bozeman, Mont.-based independent research firm focused on community development and land management, said the debate over Colorado having or not having a permanent trust fund isn’t black and white.

‘Because Colorado has a much larger and more diverse economy than many of the other states that have a lot of oil and gas and coal, there’s not as much attention paid’ to having a permanent fund, Haggerty said. ‘Having a savings fund is less consequential for the state budget.’

But a savings fund is still a good idea, Haggerty said. Colorado could reduce or eliminate property tax deductions and use the resulting revenue to create a permanent fund.”

Now that demand for coal looks to be in a permanent decline, reserves to deal with that economic dislocation aren’t there.

‘Colorado’s system hasn’t allowed those communities to make long-term savings and investments,” said Mark Haggerty, a researcher with Headwaters Economics in Bozeman, Mont. “We have created a fiscal crisis in these communities. They are being left on their own.’”

A story of fire, stolen lands, and how hard it is to get the U.S. to follow its own laws.”

Wyoming’s once-vital mineral economy is convulsing, as demand for coal wanes and operators consolidate and go bankrupt …Wyoming lags behind other Western states in terms of personal income growth, higher education attainment, and employment in high-value sectors like manufacturing.  

To a large extent, those lagging economic indicators can be traced to fossil fuel reliance. A recent Headwaters Economics report states the problem: ‘Wyoming’s decision to be dependent on energy commodity taxes has caused an economic and political ‘mineral tax trap’ wherein a political culture and commitment has developed around protecting the self-interest of low taxes and the status quo.’”

Wyoming’s once-vital mineral economy is convulsing, as demand for coal wanes and operators consolidate and go bankrupt — leaving counties owed tens of millions of dollars and hundreds out of work. So it goes for Western states riding the boom-and-bust cycles of mineral dependence.

Wyoming lags behind other Western states in terms of personal income growth, higher education attainment, and employment in high-value sectors like manufacturing.  

To a large extent, those lagging economic indicators can be traced to fossil fuel reliance. A recent Headwaters Economics report states the problem: “Wyoming’s decision to be dependent on energy commodity taxes has caused an economic and political ‘mineral tax trap’ wherein a political culture and commitment has developed around protecting the self-interest of low taxes and the status quo.” That commitment to coal was in full force this March, when Wyoming passed a law making it harder for utilities to decommission unprofitable coal-fired power plants. 

Democratic presidential candidates are rallying behind the idea of stopping new leases to extract fossil fuels from federal lands, with the majority of the field pledging to act on the issue if elected in 2020.

Regardless of the political viability, cutting federal leasing could have broad consequences — politically and financially — for swaths of the United States.

It would take years for production to be affected by simply barring new leases, and a crisis likely wouldn’t immediately hit communities that depend on federal development, said Mark Haggerty, an economist at Headwaters Economics in Montana.

“It would probably just shift the level of activity, increasing boom impacts on some places and bust impacts on others,” Haggerty said.

Today’s monster fires result largely from three human forces: taxpayer-funded fire suppression that has made the forest a tinderbox; policies that encourage construction in places that are clearly prone to burning; and climate change, which has worsened everything.

Behind these three forces is a massive economic perversity: Society masks the costs of building on the edges of the forest, a zone that planners call the “wildland-urban interface,” or the WUI. 

“In some instances, would it just be cheaper to buy the land and keep it from being developed? The answer’s clearly yes,” says Ray Rasker, executive director of Headwaters Economics, a Montana-based research group that focuses on disasters.